Coledale parents still hold out hope for
missing son
Updated July 30, 2012
10:05:43 - ABC
It's national missing persons week, and the parents of a missing
Coledale man say their son's bush survival skills give them hope that he may
still be alive.
Sue and Bob Neville say their only son Bobby had been battling bipolar
disease prior to his disappearance in September 2008 at the age of 30.
But they also say he was a keen diver and fisherman, was making bone
fishing hooks, and had the knowledge and skills to survive in the bush and
desolate areas.
Bobby Neville's mother Sue says he once built a canoe out of a fallen
tree on the Illawarra escarpment and survived trips to remote areas of
Australia.
"He had been on a number of trips right up to the cape and he actually
did manage to survive quite well", she said.
Bob Neville says he still hopes to one day get a phone call from his
son.
Missing: broken hearts keep asking why
This story first appeared in the Mercury on June 2, 2013.
Three years after his son went missing, Norm Stanton found himself walking
the paths of a Buddhist monastery poised on the edge of the Morton National
Park.
As he walked and meditated on his loss, he heard the words repeated like a
mantra inside his head:
"I'm still with you, Dad."
This was the moment when he could walk no more, when he found a log, when he
collapsed and sobbing engulfed his body.
"I felt there was an element of truth," Stanton, a retired primary school
principal, said.
"His presence was with me even if he is missing, Ian's memory is still with
me in my head and heart, and I thought, 'Let's inscribe it on my body and
get a tattoo'."
So it was that, a few weeks ago on his son's 33rd birthday, Stanton found
himself sitting in a tattoo parlour for his first piece.
Rolling up his sleeve, this gentle, thoughtful, sad and compassionate man
reveals the blue-black ink still fresh on his skin:
"I am still with you Dad." The Grebe.
Ian Stanton was a challenging son, who carried the family nickname of a bird
whose portrait appeared on a stamp when he was a baby - a bird with a small
tuft of hair like his own.
He was adored and happy as a child, but started smoking marijuana as a young
teenager and later became so difficult that he left home for a refuge before
he was 17 years old.
Probably an undiagnosed schizophrenic, he led a chaotic life. He grew dope
and may well have sold drugs for a while.
Sometimes he worked, sometimes he did not. Sometimes he had a girlfriend,
but none lasted. He developed a heroin habit for a while, but kicked it.
He was a WIRES volunteer, was artistic, became an amateur actor and
community radio announcer.
He was a talented cartoonist and - at his best - gentle, funny and clever.
The last time the family were together was a happy occasion, his 23rd
birthday, but a week later he was short and dismissive when his father
turned up at his home in Bundanoon to deliver some mail.
A week later, he was gone - no-one knows the precise date of his
disappearance - and, like 12,400 people every year in NSW, he was reported
missing.
His sister, Alex Speed, later described the experience as "living with a
permanent bruise under our skins".
The first and most important fact to realise about missing people, according
to Chief Inspector Paul Roussos, manager of the Missing Persons' Unit in
Sydney, is that the vast majority turn up again.
Of the 12,400 reported missing, only about 30 people remain missing after a
year - though some are found dead through accident, suicide or misadventure.
"If you have a concern for someone's welfare, then that starts to become a
missing person matter," Roussos said.
"That's why we say, if you have a concern for a person then report it, don't
wait.
"It's important not to wait because if there is foul play, or if something's
gone wrong, it's important to have the authorities on the matter as quick as
we can."
If police treat reports of missing people differently now, it may be partly
due to the efforts of Stanton, who tells his family's story to all new
recruits passing through the NSW Police Academy at Goulburn.
It would be fair to say, however, that the Stantons' experience was not a
good one.
"I say to cadets 'Don't treat people like I was treated. Don't make
assumptions that that person is going to turn up'," Stanton said.
"When I reported Ian missing at a police station, the officer didn't take
any details and just fobbed me off. It was a really lazy approach."
Worse still, there were only cursory search attempts at the most likely
location for Ian, the Morton National Park, where he used to go for long
rambles through the bush.
So Stanton, his wife Jean, and other family members found themselves bashing
through the undergrowth in a desperate attempt to find Ian.
"Those early days were heart-breaking stuff, not knowing what had happened,
not knowing what to do," Stanton said.
"We did our own searches but we're not bushwalkers and we're not trained to
do it."
They eventually stopped when they realised they were lost in the bush, and
saw the irony of the parents of a missing son going missing themselves.
It was up to Stanton to ring police stations, refuges, hospitals and mental
health institutions in a vain attempt that any had seen his son.
Even now, Stanton hands out photos of Ian when he talks to service clubs,
because, as he says: "You never know".
You never know.
Stanton calls it the Clayton's Loss - after the non-alcoholic drink
advertisement, whose line was "The drink you have, when you're not having a
drink".
"For me, this is the loss you have when you don't really know if it's a
loss," Stanton said.
And that is the point.
That, according to Liz Davies, the co-ordinator of the Family and Friends of
Missing Persons, is what makes the fact of a missing person so hard.
The group is the only one of its type in Australia, and was founded in 2000
after lobbying by families of missing people and is funded by the state
government.
Quoting an American expert, she calls it "ambiguous loss" for that state
when a loved one is both psychologically present but physically absent.
"The struggle for families is finding a way to sit with not knowing," Davies
said.
"They have to find a way of living with the ambiguity of the missing person.
"The recipe is a very challenging one.
"We talk with families about finding a place of comfort with themselves, of
sitting with the not knowing and lack of clarity, of being able to move
forward with their lives.
"If you come at missing from a problem-solving, solution-focused
perspective, it confounds you.
"There may be no solution, though we would love for it to be possible.
"The solution is that the person returns, so families work to find a way of
waiting that is tolerable, to find a way of living with not knowing."
The group provides a range of support, including helping support groups such
as the one that attracts up to a dozen people to share experiences every
couple of months in Corrimal.
"I don't believe we have the right to ever say to a family that there is no
hope," Davies said.
"I don't believe families ever give up hope, though the nature of their hope
might change."
Yet hope is no simple proposition.
Bob and Sue Neville have travelled around
Australia, looking for their son, Bobby.
No-one knows this better than Bob and Sue Neville, whose son left the family
home in Coledale with the words: "I'm just going for a walk, Mum".
That was one warm September day in 2008, leaving behind him parents
tormented by questions that may very well never find an answer.
It was not unusual for Bobby to leave, though he would always be in touch
eventually, but this time, Sue felt a mother's intuition when walking the
next day with Bob.
"I just had this overwhelming feeling that he's not coming back and that
something had happened. I almost dropped to my knees," she said.
Is he alive? Is he dead? Would he leave without explanation? Does he want to
be found? Did he kill himself?
Bobby Neville’s boat is still in their yard, last used a couple of weeks
before he left.
His old bomb of a car waits for the return of its owner. The fence and the
sandstone terrace he built on the property are reminders of his presence.
‘‘He is so embodied in our property that we stay, even though our property
is getting very difficult for us to manage now,’’ Sue, a retired teacher
from Figtree High, said.
Like the Stantons, the Nevilles are torn apart by the love for their child
and have only lately learned that they sometimes need to put him to one side
if they are to retain their sanity.
Bob is a retired draftsman and courier, a bearded bush character who is a
straight-talker and a man proud to set his own course, but in constant
physical pain from an old work injury.
The mental pain, too, is becoming hard to mask or to endure.
Bob admits that the void is ‘‘tormenting to the extreme’’ and that he’s
finally made an appointment with a counsellor to get help.
He reveals that he is on medication to settle him down for the interview
because, that morning, he was ‘‘shaking like a dog shitting razor blades’’.
‘‘Sometimes, I talk to him while I am doing things, it’s just a thing we do,
like going to the grave and putting flowers there,’’ Bob said.
‘‘I had got to the stage where I’d tell him I’d have to go away for a week
or two – ‘You look after yourself and I have something I have to do’.
‘‘I have found the spectre of it is too great at times.’’
This is the dark side of parental love, revealed by the constant and
desperate searching of two parents who would give anything to hold their son
in their embrace once more.
The Nevilles have travelled all over Australia in search of Bobby.
They’ve been to Adelaide, travelled the Ghan to Alice Springs, driven up to
Queensland and the NSW North Coast.
They would turn up to police stations, caravan parks, taxi ranks – anywhere
– always armed with flyers showing photos of Bobby.
Every time their hopes are raised with a possible sighting, or the discovery
of bones in an outback grave, they are smashed once more.
One time, they had only just returned from a trip up the North Coast when
they received a phone call from a caravan park owner who reckoned she had
seen him.
It sounded hopeful – a man with a skateboard under his arm, talking about
fishing and wondering if he could have a shower and a coffee.
So Sue turned right around again, seeking leave from her job, and travelled
for five hours to Laurieton.
When she arrived, she showed the owner more photos of Bobby and suddenly the
certainty faded. Maybe it wasn’t him after all.
But hope would not stop tormenting the parents, so they returned six months
later and traipsed seven kilometres up the beach, searching the scrub where
homeless young men were living rough.
The adrenaline of hope pushed Bob on until he remembered his pain and knew
he could not return, hoping only that there would be help further on.
‘‘You do lose your equilibrium and that’s where I am at the moment,’’ Bob
said.
‘‘It’s not good is it? I have lost my equilibrium, I bloody have.’’
Because another strange torture of missing is that – in many ways and in
contrast to other forms of grief – it becomes harder to bear over time.
Another member of the Corrimal support group is Karen James whose father,
former serviceman and taxi driver Leslie Hicks, vanished shortly after
breakfast on Easter Sunday, 2008.
He left his Woonona retirement village on a short walk to his daughter’s
house and has never been seen since.
For three years, James was convinced her father was alive, despite that fact
that he was nearly blind and needed daily medication for his diabetes.
She believed he may have forgotten she was away at her caravan down the
coast that day, and instead attempted the journey to his son’s house on the
mid-North Coast.
It took three years for her to buy a burial plot at Kembla Grange – her hand
was forced because they were selling fast and she wanted him buried near her
mother, who died in 1989.
‘‘That was when I started to accept that I had probably lost him,’’ James
said.
‘‘I wanted some place to go, but I have nothing to write on the headstone
because I have no date of death.’’
James only found out about her father’s disappearance on the Easter Monday,
and still regrets those 17 lost hours when he was gone but not yet reported
missing.
Like the Nevilles, she has had hopes raised and then dashed.
‘‘If I am driving, I am still looking the whole time,’’ she said.
‘‘If I see an old man the right height, if I can’t see him properly, I have
to do laps until I can get a good look. I am always on the lookout.’’
She’s been to see three clairvoyants, but has never had a message from the
other side.
One saw his body in thick lantana and brambles in bush between the Bulli
Pass and Pope’s Road, where he used to live.
But when police searched the area, they found nothing.
Until the past few months, James was reluctant to leave the house in case
she missed a phone call from her father and medication to combat anxiety has
increased in strength as time passes.
‘‘It’s funny, because when you lose somebody from death, it gets easier
every day,’’ she said.
‘‘Because you have put them to rest, and you know they’re gone.
‘‘With this, as time goes on it gets harder. You think about all the
what-ifs.
‘‘The hope starts to fade and you wonder if there might have been foul
play.’’
She hates the rain or when it’s really cold because the part that thinks
he’s still alive worries that he is cold. The part that thinks he is dead
doesn’t want his body laying out there.
‘‘I feel despair,’’ she said.
One of the men in the Corrimal group recently heard that his wife’s remains
had been found and the other people congratulated him.
The wait was over, even if the questions were not.
But although James would welcome the news that her father’s body had been
found, she knows that would not be the end.
‘‘Everybody says that you’ll have closure, but that’s a word I hate,’’ she
said.
‘‘You won’t have closure because you don’t know what happened.
‘‘You don’t know how they died or what they went through.’’
The only truly happy ending for any of these families would be if their
loved one walked in through the door.
And even then, the questions may never have answers that satisfy.